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"I've always been sensible and good," cries Isabelle Parry (Keilly McQuail), a Southern belle getting her first taste of the wicked big city.
Now our ingenue just wants to drink old-fashioneds, free of her boorish but "honorable" fianc (Thomas ...

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New Yorkers are accustomed to publicly admitting our provincialism while privately upholding the belief that we live at the center of it all. The New Museum's current exhibition "Here and Elsewhere" does nothing if not deftly point out that, at leas...

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McAllen, Texas, sits in the Rio Grande Valley at a crossroads of fates. Desperate migrants fleeing murderous drug wars arrive on the threshold of salvation. Magnates with shady interests on the other side of the border sit in their mansion perches, ...

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"People should take Gertrude seriously," declares the queen, speaking of herself in the third person. Howard Barker's 2002 rendering of Hamlet defends the title character (Hamlet's mother), by rethinking her tongue-tied collusion in her husband's mu...

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"I want to be known," says the magnetic young actor Zak Resnick, playing the part of songwriter Bert Berns. Bert who? Berns, the subject of this biographical jukebox musical, penned several of the best-known hits of the 1960s, including "Twist and S...

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Larry Clark's latest exhibition, "they thought i were but i aren't anymore...," is a small survey of sorts, composed of photographs, collages, and -- for the first time -- paintings by the New York-based artist/filmmaker who made his name more than ...

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Idris Seabright's cottage looks idyllic. Pink paint and potted palms give her living room just the right tropical breeziness. A portrait of flinty, bearded Captain Horace Seabright hangs over her tasteful mantel, honoring the family patriarch who se...

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A musical about the Manhattan Project? Bring on the dancing physicists and chorus girls in lab coats. Belt out those odes to fissure. Enrich our hearts with uranium! Atomic is in staggeringly bad taste, but (unfortunately) not in some outrageous, se...

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If you think those people in The Birds had it bad, just wait till you meet Frank, the nebbishy hero of Robin Frohardt's puppet play The Pigeoning. Now running at HERE, this charmingly quirky spectacle follows a nervous office worker's descent into m...

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The Qualification of Douglas Evans, a deeply compelling new play for the Amoralists by Derek Ahonen, looks at addiction without embellishment. It skips the pathos we're used to seeing in drinking stories and instead takes a steady march through a li...

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How is it that the nation that vilified the avant-garde in the first half of the 20th century somehow brought forth a band of artists that propelled vanguard art into the 21st century? Are Joseph Beuys (1921 -- 1986), Sigmar Polke (1941 -- 2010), an...

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Gazing at Italian painter Nicola Samori's new work might bring to mind Auden's famous opening from "Muse des Beaux Arts": "About suffering, they were never wrong, the Old Masters."
Think of Michelangelo's self-portrait in his Last Judgment fresc...

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At first glance, Fat Baby looks like any other Lower East Side bar on a weeknight. A woman waits for someone while texting impatiently. A guy on a stool engages his date and the bartender in a movie-trivia conversation. A reedy twink in Nantucket Re...

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Which guitar would you play your life story on? The weather-beaten one in the corner? The shiny new number? The electric guitar that's ready to make some noise?
If you were Benjamin Scheuer, you'd choose them all. In his new, solo musical, The Li...

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High school reunions can be bittersweet occasions. Old friends gather. They share photos and reminisce. And they decide how to bomb the FBI.
In The Muscles in Our Toes, Stephen Belber's new shouty, banter-heavy comedy, a clandestine group of alum...

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The two-year-long drumroll for the Whitney Museum's Jeff Koons retrospective sounds like a nonstop whoopee cushion. The stuttering symphony has included clapper noises from various auction houses, the dueling bongos of twin exhibitions at New York's...

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If you know someone who works for a museum, chances are you know someone who's burned out. Your friend likely toils for a barely sane or disgruntled boss, faces down spreadsheets pooling with red ink, and endures juggernauts of meetings. That friend...

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An entire neighborhood assembles onstage in Holler If Ya Hear Me, a new hip-hop musical inspired by the lyrics of rapper Tupac Shakur. But one man is conspicuously missing from the crowd: That'd be Shakur himself, a bard of America's violent streets...

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Vaudeville has long been an essential element in director Robert Wilson's multi-layered creations, but rarely as much as in The Old Woman. In this international coproduction now at BAM, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Willem Dafoe make a high-octane pair of...